Another in the list of lost films from the Franco era, I stumbled across Font’s family drama having a few free hours to spare on a passing visit to Madrid. It is an intriguing film, which looks at the way that the unit of the family served to stifle Spain with both its conservatism and its decadence. Eduardo is a doctor from a wealthy family who wants to open a clinic in an old house which has been left to go to ruins by a family who can’t think of anything to do with it. He and his forthright wife, Elisa, launch a campaign to get the family to permit this development, but his aunts and uncles are intransigent. The issue goes, in Dickensian style, to the courts, but no resolution seems imminent. The film is both an intimate portrayal of an upper class family, but also a sweeping portrait of late sixties Barcelona. A fascinating B story reveals the social divisions, as Eduardo’s dissolute cousin has an affair with the landlady of a bar, a relationship he’s terrified to reveal to his mother, the patrician Aurelia. The film is in black and white, which feels appropriate, but there’s one quietly astonishing sequence when Eduardo & Elisa visit the old house they want to recover. All of a sudden, Font switches to colour, the camera panning around the stately home and gardens which are in ruins, a compelling metaphor for a suffocating society letting past glories go to seed.
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